Hacker News Reader

Comment by oxfordmale | Hacker News Reader

I feel this is comparing apple and pears. For sure AWS is more expensive, however, you looking at a markup of 50%, at most 100%.

View on HN

Oh, that's not even close. It's closer to 500%

Businesses are crazy but not that crazy. There are a number of hidden costs when self hosting.

For sure Cloud is more expensive, but if you quote 500%, you are overlooking hidden costs.

Would be 1000% in our comparison

Your calculation is over simplified. For example, hardware just doesn't run for five years without glitch once once you have multiple servers.

For sure Cloud is more expensive, as it charges a premium for not having to invest upfront in a lot of hardware, however,if it was 1000% no one would be using the Cloud.

Scaling how often I have failures on my 80 servers, of which 50 are similar in spec to Ahrefs (16 HDDs), it should still be less than one full-time position to manage 850 servers. Probably much less, as I'm a bit inefficient when it's <5% of my job.

I have a fixed day or two each year working out what to buy and getting quotes (which would be the same time whether it's 20 or 200 servers), half a day per 20 servers for installation in racks, and call it half a day per 20 for initial configuration (most of the time to script the process, so it would also be similar for 200). After that, it's at absolute most an hour every couple of months to deal with a failed disc or similar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com